Question 1

What is the difference between FTTC and FTTP?

Accepted Answer

**How far the fibre actually goes** — and that single fact determines almost everything about the speed and reliability you get.

**FTTC — fibre to the cabinet.** Fibre runs from the exchange to the green street cabinet, and the final stretch from cabinet to your house is the existing **copper telephone line**. Sometimes marketed as "superfast" or "fibre broadband", which has been criticised as misleading since the connection into the home is not fibre at all.

**The copper is the bottleneck**, and its performance degrades with **distance**. A property a few hundred metres from the cabinet may get close to the maximum; one over a kilometre away may get a fraction of it. This is why neighbours on the same package get very different speeds, and why nothing the ISP does can fix it.

Copper is also susceptible to **moisture, corroded joints and electrical interference**, which is behind a great many intermittent faults.

**FTTP — fibre to the premises.** Fibre runs the whole way, terminating in an **optical network terminal** on your wall. Also called full fibre or FTTH.

**What changes:**

**Distance stops mattering.** Optical loss over the short distances involved is negligible, so everyone on the network gets the advertised speed.

**Much higher speeds**, with symmetric or near-symmetric options available.

**Far fewer faults**, since fibre is immune to water ingress and electrical interference.

**Lower latency**, meaningfully so for gaming and video calls.

**Other technologies you will see:**

**FTTN / FTTdp** — variations on how far the fibre reaches.

**G.fast** — squeezing higher speeds from short copper runs, a transitional technology being superseded.

**Cable (DOCSIS)** — coaxial rather than twisted-pair copper, delivering high download speeds with much lower upload, and shared capacity at the local node.

**Full fibre rollout** is proceeding through both the incumbent network and alternative networks, and availability varies enormously by street rather than by town.

**The copper phone network is being retired**, so voice services are moving to internet-based delivery — which matters for anyone relying on a landline in a power cut.

Question 2

What do "up to" and "average" broadband speeds actually mean?

Accepted Answer

They are defined advertising terms rather than promises, and understanding which one you were given tells you what you can actually hold a provider to. "Up to" speeds described the theoretical

Question 3

What is fixed wireless access, and is it as good as a cable?

Accepted Answer

Fixed wireless access (FWA) delivers broadband to a building over a radio link rather than a wire — typically from a mobile network's 4G or 5G masts to a receiver in your home. Why it exists. Digging

Question 4

How does fibre actually carry data?

Accepted Answer

As pulses of light down a strand of extremely pure glass, guided by a physical effect that keeps the light from escaping even as the cable bends. The physical mechanism. A fibre has a core of glass

Question 5

What is the last mile problem?

Accepted Answer

The final connection from a network's local distribution point to each individual building is disproportionately expensive, and that single fact shapes almost everything about broadband availability,

Question 6

How does cable broadband work, and what is DOCSIS?

Accepted Answer

Cable broadband delivers internet over the coaxial television network, using a standard called DOCSIS — Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification — that defines how data shares that cable with

Question 7

Why is my upload speed so much slower than my download speed?

Accepted Answer

Most residential connections are deliberately asymmetric, meaning far more capacity is allocated to downloading than uploading. This is a design decision rather than a fault. Historically households

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